United States v. Dawson

The defendants were convicted by a jury of federal drug offenses and sentenced to 300 months in prison (Ingram) and 360 months (Dawson). Among the grounds for reversal that they press on us with misplaced zeal in more than 130 pages of briefs is that in every trial of a federal drug offender the prosecution must prove that the defendants offense had an actual impact on interstate or foreign commerce. Otherwise, they argue, the prosecution may exceed the regulatory power conferred on Congress by the commerce clause of the Constitution. The statutes under which the defendants were prosecuted, 21 U.S.C. §§ 841, 846, do not, it is true, make effect on commerce an element of the crime, and so no proof of such an effect was presented at the trial. But it is common knowledge that the traffic in most illegal drugs-certainly including cocaine, the drug involved in this case, very little of which is manufactured in the United States because no coca is grown here-is national or (in the case of cocaine) international rather than local. Of course there are local sales of the drugs, at the end of the commerce chain; but these, taken in the aggregate, certainly affect the interstate and international traffic in these drugs, and that is the only handle that Congress requires to be empowered by the commerce clause to legislate with respect to the local sales. Gonzales v. Raich, 125 S.Ct. 2195, 2205-06 (2005). The Lopez decision, on which the defendants principally rely, reaffirmed Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), which had held that wheat grown by a farmer for his own consumption was within the commerce power because it is traded in a national market and home consumption affects the amount available for that trade. United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S. 549, 559-60 (1995). Similarly, local sales of drugs affect the demand for their importation. United States v. Thomas, 159 F.3d 296, 297-98 (7th Cir. 1998).